In the Trenches with Hearts and Minds: DevOps as “Settled Science” or Largely an Uncontrolled Experiment?
This session moves deeper into the actual operational experience of DevOps practitioners in the field. Four seasoned professionals will review how various DevOps practices play out in the real world. They’ll examine such notions as creating a single repository of truth, reducing batch sizes, keeping team sizes small, increasing feedback loops, building infrastructure in code, shifting left, continuously testing, and on to automation. At this juncture, is DevOps really as scientific a set of practices as its proponents claim? Or is it something else? Are the metrics produced in the annual “State of DevOps Report” to be taken at face value? Ultimately, what is the “winning combination” of practices that ensures DevOps success from the perspective of those who do this work every day?
Don Luchini is a Boston-based DevOps engineer specializing in infrastructure management and deployment automation pipelines. Over the past ten years, he has acted in the corporate IT, quality assurance, software development, and release engineering spaces, encompassing a number of roles that now fall under the term DevOps. He currently works at SimpliSafe, a Boston-based manufacturer of connected home security systems. In his spare time, he is a martial artist, radio enthusiast, and hobby photographer.
Cody is a DevOps-Engineer-recently-turned-IT-Project-Manager, nonbinary activist, compulsive event planner, and Organizational Development nerd. Xe is working on a grant-funded project to implement optional pronoun entry into IAM systems at Harvard. Xe weaves accessibility and inclusion into all of xyr work, technical or otherwise.
